This Paper’s Still a Monitor of World Affairs

The numbers at the Christian Science Monitor test the faith.

Circulation, which peaked at 240,000 in the early 1970s, fell to 150,000 by 1983, to 92,000 a decade later, and now it flutters around 78,000.

The average age of its readers is 60.

The paper last reported a profit in 1956--and since then has lost more than $300 million. Still, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, continues to subsidize the thoughtful Monday-to-Friday daily, 89 years after the sect’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, started the paper “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” and to serve as an alternative to the yellow journalism of the day. Although three-quarters of the paper’s readers are not Christian Scientists, the church will give a subsidy of $17 million in this fiscal year.

Indeed, the shutdown in June of Monitor Radio, which transmitted daily news broadcasts and other programming via about 200 public radio stations--losing about $8 million a year--apparently does not herald an imminent day of reckoning for the Monitor itself.

“The Monitor is here to stay,” Editor in Chief David T. Cook said the other day from the paper’s offices in Boston. “The church remains committed to being in the news business. For the foreseeable future, that means that this newspaper has its support.”

To underscore this assertion, Cook revealed that the paper, known for its in-depth stories and unwavering coverage of foreign news (each issue also carries one “spiritual perspective” on daily life), is in the middle of a redesign being directed by the renowned graphic arts team of Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard. Cook said the paper expects to introduce a new but familiar look in the fall.

“We also need to reach out to the younger generation,” Cook, who is 50, added. “That’s one reason we’re excited about our E-Monitor, because it helps get additional eyeballs onto the paper.”

Yes, since last year the smallish color tabloid also has been available online, at https://www.csmonitor.com, which offers contents of the day’s issue, as well as a free search of the paper’s archives back to 1980. In addition, Karla Vallance, the former executive producer of Monitor Radio, is sticking around to help explore what Cook calls “our next steps in the media world.”

The evidence appears to indicate that the rarest of species, a quiet voice, will still be heard amid the cacophony of news media, long after the voices of other thoughtful publications have gone silent. The National Observer, a weekly broadsheet that featured bright writing and early takes on social trends, was closed by Dow Jones & Co. in 1977 when the paper had a paid circulation of about 450,000 but had run up losses put at $16 million. Saturday Review, the arts and culture magazine founded by Christopher Morley and Henry Luce in 1924, died in 1986 after changing hands a number of times and watching its circulation dwindle to 144,000.

But there are nagging problems. The Monitor must meet a ridiculously early editorial deadline of noon in order to be printed in time at plants in Massachusetts and Arizona and service the mail subscriptions used by most of its readers.

What’s more, good as it is, the Monitor can be the hardest thing for nonsubscribers to find if they don’t live near the roughly 2,500 Christian Science reading rooms scattered around the country.

“It’s an interesting paper in many ways, but you rarely ever see it,” said Thomas E. Patterson, a professor of government and media at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In surveys of national audiences that Patterson has helped conduct, it does not register.

Jim McGlinchy, a CBS News producer in Washington, said that he rarely picks up the Monitor, assuming that it will have nothing to drive his day. “But I know that when I do look at it, it will have, for example, a long story on Azerbaijan that will hook you, so that you have to read the whole thing,” he added. (The sixth Pulitzer Prize won by the paper was for international reporting, awarded last year to correspondent David Rohde, who had found mass graves near Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia.)

At the Monitor, Cook speaks about the “financial sacrifices” that many of the 105 or so staffers have made to work for the paper and the optimism they share.

His own optimism is buoyed by a detail buried in recent stories about the falloff in total book sales--namely, that sales of religious books are growing.

“We are not proselytizing here,” Cook said, “but would those people interested in religious books be in the market for a quiet paper? Those who care about the kind of news that comes into their homes--that’s a market for us.”